by Elsa Johnson

As I drive about, during this busy time of the year, observing the annual riotous explosion of nature and the never-ending human need to keep nature in check (all those tightly trimmed gumdrops and bowling ball shrubs — all those landscapes of polka-dot plants adrift in a sea of mulch)

I wonder: how did our sense of what a landscape or garden should look like come about?

How much do the examples of traditional great landscapes and gardens influence us?  –   such as the naturalistic English landscape; the elaborate, contrived, formal estate gardens of the Renaissance and early enlightenment Europe; the elaborate, formal pleasure gardens of the Middle East and Asia; the naturalist seeming Japanese Gardens, that are actually deeply artificial –  these all remnants of the gardens of the economic and political elite through time .  The gardens of more ordinary people endure less well, alas  – but, still, we do have a picture in our heads when we say cottage garden, herb garden, kitchen garden, commons (that small parcel of shared land around which a village grew).

What do these diverse examples of landscape and garden have in common? I believe that what informs them is a human need to order toward simplification what we see as disordered nature. 

There are exceptions: we know (today) that the indigenous peoples of the Amazon River basin traditionally lived in what we now acknowledge as a food forest, which was and is – where it still exists – a place where these peoples live in accord with the seasonal productivity of the forest. The food forest is an example of a complex system (rather than a simple one), shaped (somewhat) by the people who lived/live within it. To western sensibilities the food forest as garden was and remains largely invisible because the organizational principles underlying it are not simple and thus not readily visible. 

More often we see that he human need to impose order – to hold a thing quiet in time — is directly opposed to nature’s inherent mutability. We create outdoor spaces and then work hard and spend a lot of money (and endure a lot of noise) to keep them from changing one iota over time, in a climate (northeast Ohio) where garden or lawn, left untended for even one year, quickly begins the process of returning to forest. Nature is about fecundity.

Nature unchecked.

Gardening is about controlling fecundity, holding it in check.  We want the garden to behave like architecture – a thing that once built and decorated, does not change. Hence the gumdrops, bowling balls, and polka-dot plants adrift in a sea of mulch. But, there are other options, ranging from naturalized to a careful balance of order and nature.

See naturalized gardens below:

See a balance of natural and man-made below:

Underlying the need to hold time quiet is the fact that simple landscapes are easier to maintain for the non-gardener, and I include as non-gardeners most of the landscape crews to whom we outsource the maintenance of our gardens, who, largely untrained, can only repeat what they see and are given or told to do. We do not hire gardeners: that word implies knowledge about the plant world. Instead we hire maintenance crews – most of whom have no specialized knowledge beyond how to mow, trim and edge in a flurry of action and noise (none of it carbon neutral), and as quickly depart.   

Some friends of mine recently sold their large house in its richly complex landscape which had been developed over a decade of time. When the realtors came to take a look at the property before putting it on the market, they said no one would want that landscape, and urged that the landscape be simplified (meaning, rip a bunch of stuff out and replace with mulch), the implication being that no one wants a visually and ecologically complex landscape.  No one, of course except the birds and the bees and the butterflies and all the other beneficial insects. 

There is naturalistic, and then there is something that is just too much like real nature. What do you think? We’d like to hear from you.            

by Elsa Johnson

The trees I especially enjoy this time of year are serviceberry, Canadian red chokeberry, yellow flowered magnolia, and American larch.

Amalanchiers – our native serviceberries – are usually among the earliest trees to bloom; its fragile flowers are almost as ephemeral as our native ephemeral wildflowers, the Spring-beauty, and Cutleaf Toothwort (the latter the host plant to the West Virginia White Butterfly), both of which bloom at about the same time as serviceberries. The delicate filigree blossoms develop in pale shades of grey, pink, and green, but unfold and open white, resembling clusters of particularly light and airy snow. Alas, they do not last long if the days are warm, while cool weather prolongs their stay, and soon the tiny white petals drift down like a particularly gentle snow. I love serviceberry, especially in its multi-trunk or clump form, which, judiciously internally opened up, makes a very nice semi-transparent screening tree. This also allows one to appreciate its silvery ‘skin’.   

Our native Canadian red chokeberry, Prunus virginiana, is often mistaken for its cousin, prunus cistena, a lesser creature, which also bears small pale pink flowers in spring and has red-purple leaves. Canadian red chokeberry can also be found as a multi-trunked tree, and, opened up the same way, also makes for a pleasant screening tree. The delicate pale pink blossoms flower just before and as the red-purple leaves emerge. The berries, edible, juicy but tart, should be cooked into a jelly, for example, and not eaten raw. The roots and bark, although toxic, have medicinal uses.

The yellow flowered magnolias are another of my springtime favorite small trees because they are late bloomers that usually escape being destroyed by those flower-devastating late freezes (like the one we recently experienced).  There is something about their buttery yellow strappy flowers opening that is just so cheerful and fresh! – ( and not as lurid as the late blooming magenta magnolias). These magnolias also tend to be densely branched and multi-trunked, with smooth grey bark in their youth.

Finally, there is American Larch, a deciduous evergreen one does not often see. My family had one in our ‘yard’ (40 acres) and every year in the fall, when it turned strong yellow and the needles fell, my grandmother would say “That tree’s dying – we’d better cut it down”. But in the spring time when the new bright green needle buds began to open – oh! how fresh and soft they were. I liked to run my hands down them. They felt so alive. This tree did very well for us and eventually got quite large. I often wonder why is not used more.